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Understated Evidence and the Resurrection of Jesus

[Below is a somewhat
reworked version of a post from many months ago here.]

In addressing
the viability of evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, Jeffery Jay Lowder has argued that pretty
much any naturalistic explanation is better than the explanation that Jesus
rose from the dead, and suggested that arguments to the contrary are based on
the fallacy of understated evidence. By this fallacy he means,following Paul Draper, to "identify some general fact F about a topic X that is
antecedently more likely on theism than on naturalism, but ignore other more specific
facts about X, facts that, given F, are more likely on naturalism than on
theism." Here I will briefly rebut some of Lowder's statements (his original post in full along with subsequent comments here.) He says,

Since
we're dealing with inductive logic, what matters is prior probability and
explanatory power. C&C [Greg Cavin and Carlos Colombetti, in "The Great Mars Hill Resurrection Debate"] offer a 1-2 punch against the
Resurrection as an explanatory hypothesis. First, R has a vanishingly low prior
probability, far lower than any serious naturalistic explanation.

Okay, first
I don’t think P(R) is “vanishingly low” unless we cut out certain important
facts such as Jesus’ very strong and consistent claims of uniquely
divine/messianic status, wide reports of his miracles of healing and exorcism,
and his predictions of his own pending crucifixion in Jerusalem (to be followed
by his resurrection). This is why I say the prior probability of the
resurrection of Jesus, even if lower than comparatively more mundane events,
has to be much higher than the probability of anyone else’s resurrection. And
of course, if P(R) is much higher than some other probability, then it cannot
really be vanishingly low (even the lowest probability is somewhere above
zero). Also it seems to me that the estimation of prior probability of an
identifiable historical event ought to be substantially low in the first place,
given that by definition specific historical events only happen once – which may
explain why historians are typically not keen on Bayesianism and probability
calculus to guide their research.

Likewise I
don’t see why a naturalistic explanation should have a higher prior probability
by default (assuming anyone can adequately define what “naturalistic” means
beyond “non-supernaturalistic”). For instance, consider a naturalistic
explanation involving a huge colony of countless millions of South American
army ants that were drawn to the tomb by the decomposing corpse of Jesus by the
barest hint of a stray scent, that travelled across the ocean using their own
bodies as a bridge (they have been known to cross streams and rivers this way),
that combined their efforts to move the stone from the entryway of the tomb and
remove the body of Jesus, and then devoured the body, leaving only a skeleton
in the desert.

Though
seemingly naturalistic (non-supernaturalistic), the South American army ant
explanation would be neither appreciably parsimonious nor would fit appreciably
well with our background knowledge of how the world works generally. The most
we could say for such a scenario is “It’s logically possible.” But my example
admittedly is not serious. So I guess what we need is (1) some objective means
to distinguish naturalistic from non-naturalistic explanations, and (2) some
objective means to distinguish serious from non-serious naturalistic
explanations.

As it
stands now, I don’t see that a naturalistic explanation for a phenomenon
should be any more or less antecedently probable than a theistic
explanation. Both God and nature are quite powerful in principle, as both
are said by their respective spokesmen to be capable of creating the universe,
creating life, imparting consciousness and moral awareness to humanity, etc.
Besides, within the same "multiverse" scenario often postulated to
explain fine-tuning of the universe on naturalism, anything logically and
physically possible
is also probable
(see "Fine-Tuning Denialism and the Demise of Science"). Anything, of course,
includes the resurrection of Jesus. The question, then, is not whether the resurrection
has a low prior probability relative to naturalistic explanations, since both
naturalism and theism can account for anything that actually happens. The
question is which view has greater explanatory scope and explanatory power. Lowder continues:

Second,
it's far from clear that R explains the alleged data. By itself, R says nothing
about the risen Jesus did after His resurrection. You have unwittingly
conflated the Resurrection hypothesis with the New Testament stories / claims
of what the risen Jesus did AFTER his resurrection. I agree that what the NT
claims happened is possible. Sure, he could have moved the stone, walked out of
the tomb, and appeared to different people. But the content of R doesn't
include those activities. All R says is that Jesus rose from the dead. .... R is also
compatible with the risen Jesus sitting in the tomb indefinitely, basking in
his own supreme glory. Or it could be the case that R is true and, after his
death, the risen Jesus teleported to central America, appearing to various
indigenous people, in a fashion similar to what is reported by the Book of
Mormon. Now, I obviously don't believe that happened. The point is that R by
itself gives us no more reason to expect one of these 'extra-curricular'
activities than any other. .... This much
is certain: R does not ENTAIL the data. In other words, the probability of
Jesus' crucifixion, burial, empty tomb, and postmortem appearances, CONDITIONAL
UPON THE ASSUMPTION THAT R IS TRUE, is less than 1.

Those are
good points. And with all that I have a better idea of what C&C were getting at with
their suggestion that R falls short of explaining the facts so often cited in
support of it. To this I would say firstly that whereas R is admittedly not a
complete explanation, it’s at least a partial explanation. So to derive a full
explanation we would have to employ a chain of inferences drawn from
two widely attested propositions:

J (Jesus)
is who he claimed to be: the Son of God, with access to divine power,

and

P, Jesus
promised to resurrect three days after his predicted death and re-commune with
his disciples.

Together J
and P explain

R, the
resurrection of Jesus from the dead, which (with J and P) explains

E (the
empty tomb) and A (postmortem appearances), which (with J, P and R) explain

B, the
birth of the church in Jerusalem, which is to say nothing of

C, the
conversion of Saul of Tarsus

Thus J * P
entail R, and R (with J * P) entails the relevant data, and
thus the resurrection hypothesis enjoys great explanatory power.
Moreover, R explains the otherwise inexplicable alignment of the data, a
diverse set of phenomena restricted to the mid first century and the region of
Palestine: the empty tomb of Jesus, the postmortem appearances, and the rise of
the early church. Naturalistic alternatives to the contrary have to conjoin a number
of disparate ad hoc elements, and leave out others (like Saul’s conversion).
This suggests that the resurrection hypothesis enjoys greater explanatory scope
than the naturalistic alternatives proposed to date.

So what is
wrong exactly with a "supernatural" or "spiritual"
explanation for the resurrection? Well, I think some people are simply inclined
to equate "nature" with "reality," outside of which lies
the "supernatural." But this is misleading. If God exists – and
that's the underlying issue here – then God is necessarily part of reality
(given the modest premise that anything that exists is part of reality). As we have seen, the real problem here
is that naturalists, not supernaturalists, are understating the evidence.

I meant to say more about how God can easily suspend the perceived regularities of the nature He created because both God and His creation constitute a single reality, but maybe I can address it another time.

As usual, I'm going to say a lot of the problems come from proponents and opponents on either side treating Bayesian Theory (or to be more precise the revised form promoted by an ally of Bayes, which is what is typically regarded as BT now) as a probability math operation -- when it definitely isn't.

It looks like a math operation, and there is a valid math operation that it looks like, and that valid math operation can have some connection to a very particular and limited type of probability estimation. So the confused conflation is understandable; but that doesn't make the conflation any more proper.

One of these days I need to post up an article I was writing long ago on the topic... (Some of it is in the article I linked to, but not all of it.)

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